December 2012
Intermediate to advanced
631 pages
13h 10m
English
PríAamos Georgiades, CrystalGraphics, Inc., Santa Clara, California
The standard way of obtaining the shortest distance from a point P to a plane J is finding the orthogonal projection Q of P onto J so that the distance is the length of the vector P– Q. This involves computing a square root. Furthermore, if the application requires ordering a set of points with respect to their distance from J, it is necessary to know on which side of the plane the points lie. That would require another dot product operation. This chapter discusses the signed distance from P to J with a single dot product and an addition. In most applications, it is necessary to normalize the plane normal at one ...
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